The It Kit — Sex Education Prototype

Art Direction, Creative Direction, Product Design,

The It Kit is a prototype for a sex education product developed as part of the Innovation Next initiative. Created for newly autonomous college freshmen, the kit provides a well-designed jump off point for young adults to lead sex positive lives.

How might we educate and protect teen girls during this pivotal time in their lives to help prevent unwanted pregnancies?

The Concept:

The It Kit helps female freshmen to be prepared for any sexual situations they would want to engage in.

Our awesome intern, Mazzy, was part of our target audience and helped out throughout the process. We also interviewed 21 people, including teens, parents, and newly autonomous adults, throughout the process.

Several of our early prototypes. The first, a lego-created prototype at the IDEO workshop. Next, we created a cardboard prototype to get a feel for the box size, shape, and materials. The next iteration used a Birchbox to emulate the design effect we would eventually add to the box, as well as partially designed materials to go inside the box. We tested the second two prototypes with users in our target audience to inform the design of the final prototype.

The final prototype, showing the consent comic and information about IVY, a smart clinic finding sms text service.

The It Kit includes male condoms as well as a DIY tutorial for how to make a dental dam for safe oral play.

Our audience absolutely loved the buttons we created that were part of the kit! Icons designed by Maggie Famiglietti, buttons designed by Laura Pursel.

A process shot of Laura creating some kickass illustrations for our deck of cards.

We created a deck of cards with each suit offering a different type of answers to common questions — sex questions, body questions, STI questions, and birth control questions. Each card has a question on the back and an answer on its face, so they can be played like regular bicycle cards, or read through like flash cards. Our audience loved the product because we weren't forcing them to take in the information; they could play with the cards as normal.

The core team — Margot, Julian, and I.

The Team

The core team who completed research, interviews, and the Innovation Next process included Margot Mausner, Julian Gindi, and myself. We were also joined by several others who helped bring the project to life.